This article is a place holder and needs someone to take it in hand and finish the first draft. If you would like to take this article in hand, leave a reply message below or contact Rock Currier via private message by clicking on the PM button next to my name at the top of the article.

Can you help make this a better article? What good localities have we missed? Can you supply pictures of better specimens than those we show here? Can you give us more and better information about the specimens from these localities? Can you supply better geological or historical information on these localities?

Rock, I would be happy to provide specimen photos and text about the following locations if you would like to create the threads.

Can you help make this a better article? What good localities have we missed? Can you supply pictures of better specimens than those we show here? Can you give us more and better information about the specimens from these localities? Can you supply better geological or historical information on these localities?

GypsumCa4> · 2H2O Monoclinic

Gypsum, Boldut Mine, Cavnic, Romania, 9cm wide

Gypsum has been found at numerous locations throughout the Maramures District of Romania. Varying habits and associations have been observed depending on the locality, and several different habits have even been noted from the same mine. Gypsum crystals from Baia Mare, Baia Sprie and Herja are generally long, slender prisms but swallow-tail twins have also been found 1. They are often colorless, but can be tinted yellow or reddish-brown by iron oxide, red by realgar, or black by jamesonite. Of all the mines throughout the district, gypsum occurs most frequently in the mines at Cavnic. The finest crystals were probably large water clear crystals found in the Boldut Mine in 1990. Stubby, bladed, straw-colored crystals have also been found, and white crystals in unique sheaf-like arrangements were recovered from a single pocket in the Boldut Mine in March 2002. The Roata Mine once produced beautiful zoned crystals to 6 cm with slender, reddish-brown prisms and clear terminations1.1. Lapis, Jg. 21, Nr. 7/8 (in German)

The Maramures District is situated in northwest Romania between Hungary to the north and the Transylvanian Plateau to the south. The earliest mining records for the district date back to the 11th century. The mines exploited polymetallic sulfide ores, and over 125 minerals have been identified from the Maramures District. Mines are located in Baia Mare, Herja, Cavnic, and Baia Sprie, locations which were historically known as Nagybánya, Kisbánya, Kapnik, and Felsöbánya respectively. These latter names, which are common in many old mineral books and on old mineral labels, are the Hungarian names since Romania was part of Hungary until 1920. The mines at Cavnic were famous for producing a colorful assemblage of minerals and it is the type locality for rhodochrosite. Two of Cavnic’s mines produced the majority of contemporary mineral specimens, the Boldut Mine and the Roata Mine. As of September 2007, all of the mines in the Maramures District are closed, the pumps have been removed, and the mines are flooded.

Michael,Thats a good start, but you need to conform more to the format that we have developed for the rest of the articles.. Also the method you used to include images in the articles is much more limiting than the method we current use and does not allow the writer to size and place the images where he wants them and only allow a maximum of three images per post. Look at the Prehnite article that contains over 200 images. Read the instructions to authors in the Best Minerals welcome section. I went into the first of your articles and did a little initial tweaking and organizing. Click on the edit button at the bottom of your first post and you can see what you need to do and where to put the captions for the images. Don't get discouraged, Rome was not built in a day. Providing that the images are available I like to encourage the authors to use a generous variety of images of specimens from each locality. This will educate the user about what is possible for the mine.

Michael,You should upload the photos to the mindat database rather than just attaching them to messages here on the board. It does allow people to view them on the regular gallery pages and your homepage. Also, this format may not turn out to be what we will be using in the future and pictures just in the message board might not be able to make the transformation.

No problem, thanks for the pointers. I'll have a look at the prehnite article and try to conform to it. That begs the question - should I delete the photos and upload them to the mindat database, then incorporate them into the best minerals project? Also, I have looked through all of the Mindat gypsum pictures from Romania and there are several others that should be included. However, something didn't feel right about fooling with someone elses photo. Please advise. Lastly, I noted that many of the photos have a small copyright noted just as part of the jpeg image. How is that done? Sorry for all of the questions, but better to get things straightened out at the start.

Michael, I didn't check all the images you put in the article, but at least some of them are already included in the image gallery and those you won't have to enter. I make free use of all the images in the mindat gallery for the articles that I am working on. Most of the time the people who upload the pictures are glad to see their children up in lights, and in fact I have never heard of anyone that was not pleased.

On your computer, bring up a note pad field and keep it handy and then open the Romanian Gypsum gallery and start looking at the pictures from the first page on. As soon as you see an image you want to use in your article, select the locality name and copy it into the notepad document, and then point at the TN image with the mouse and right click and copy the link address and paste it below the locality. If there is more than one good image from that locality just point at it and copy the link and at it to the list of link addresses for that locality. When you have finished with all the Romanian Gypsums, you will have a nice alphabetical listing that you can paste into your article to work from. You will have to reverse the locality strings to match the format of the rest of the articles but all the image links are listed right there in your article ready for you to use and refer to as you construct the article. More and more, I enter all the locality names and then insert the pictures and then go back over the whole mess several times to make sure that the picture size has been optimized for attractiveness and all the line spacings are correct. When this has been done I go back and start writing what I know about the locality and its specimens below the picture{s) for each locality or if I don't know about them, I put in a line of text begging for some one to come and help with the information about the locality and its specimens, and I do that a lot.

Rock,Hopefully this is what you had in mind as far as format. It probably needs some additional tweaking here and there, but I think most of the info is there and in the proper format.Regards,Michael Shaw